Friday, August 30, 2013

Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

Universally panned by critics and a bonafide box office bomb,
Johnny Mnemonic was a disaster financially, it made roughly 19 million on a
budget of 26, this even though it starred Keanu Reeves, an actor whose career
was smoking red hot at that particular moment in time. You see, Reeves had just
finished making Jan De Bont’s Speed (1994) when he decided to jump on the
Johnny Mnemonic bandwagon. Speed was an extremely successful film at the box office
and a great career move for Keanu; it raised his status as an actor by turning
him into box office gold. So considering how popular Reeves was at the time,
why did Johnny Mnemonic end up being such an epic fail? It certainly wasn’t because
of lack of star power. The film also starred Dolph Lungdren as a crazy
homicidal preacher, Udo Kier as a techno agent, Henry Rollins and Ice-T as
rebel leaders and Takeshi Kitano (of Sonatine fame) as the head of a an evil corporation. Maybe the film failed because it wasn’t that good? Could it be that
it disappointed audiences or hardcore cyberpunk fans somehow?

In the film Johnny Mnemonic is a courier, which is just a
fancy word for delivery man. The thing is that the guy is a courier of digital
data that he carries somewhere in the back of his mind. Problem is the package
he’s just uploaded is huge and exceeding storage capacity can kill you! You
see, in this future a big percentage of humanity is suffering from a decease
called N.A.S., which stands for Nerve Attenuation Syndrome. Basically, N.A.S. is a condition that affects
the human nervous system and is caused by the onslaught of electronic devices
to which humanity is exposed to in a daily basis. Technology is making humanity
sick and it’s because of information overload, airwaves poisoned by technological
civilization. Humanity just can’t live without their gadgets. Good thing is
that there’s a cure, bad thing is that the powers that be don’t want humanity
to have it because they’d rather have people as patients, paying for their costly
treatments for N.A.S. But wait, there’s hope! A group of rebel scientists are
hell bent on releasing the cure for N.A.S. to the free world! These rebels fight
against the system and humanities dependency on technology. From time to time
they send subversive messages to the masses through television saying things
like “Snatch back your brain zombie, and hold it!” To make everything right all
they have to do is send the cure from Beijing to New Wark; via courier. That’s where Johnny Mnemonic comes into play. Will
Johnny make it in time before the overload of information in his brain kills
him?

This project had many good things going for it, number one,
the screenplay was written by the ‘father of cyberpunk’ William Gibson. Who’s
William Gibson you say, well, he’s the guy responsible for writing the very
first cyberpunk novels, novels about technologically suffocated societies in
which people are more mechanical than human, worlds in which people spend more
time in the virtual world than in the real world. This is a wing of science
fiction that focuses on “high tech, low life”. Gibson wrote ‘Neuromancer’ one
of the seminal works of the cyberpunk genre; it’s a story about a hacker who’s
hired to pull off the mother of all hacks. The novel takes place in this Blade Runner
like world with problems like over population and again, a society over
dependent on technology. Neuromancer is so thick I’ve yet to finish reading it!
It’s quite dense, a true challenge to read, and this comes from someone who
fancies himself a science fiction fan! This fascinating and at times
nightmarish book holds some similarities with Johnny Mnemonic; actually it even
shares some characters. Johnny Mnemonic in turn is a film that’s based on another
one of Gibson’s works; a short story entitled ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ which was first
published in Omni magazine, and later re-printed in Gibson’s collection of
short fiction stories called ‘Burning Chrome’, a book I will be acquiring soon!
Johnny Mnemonic by the way is one of Gibson’s first works, first published way
back in 1981, so it’s fitting in a way that one of his earliest works is the
first to get the big screen treatment.

For the longest time (as far back as 1989) Gibson and his
pal Robert Lungo (who ended up sitting on the director’s chair) had been trying
to get funding for Johnny Mnemonic. In their minds, Johnny Mnemonic was a film
that could be pulled off for a mere 1.5 million dollars; in other words, they
wanted to take an art house approach to this story; an artsy version of Johnny
Mnemonic. A small yet creative film, and I gotta wonder what that film might
have turned out like. But it kept getting harder and harder to get any
financial backing for the film because studios didn’t like the fact that they
were trying to make such a small film. Studios like multimillion dollar
productions with big stars attached to them, something big and bombastic, something
they can sell. Things finally pulled through when Keanu Reeves read the script
(which myth has it was left at his door step!) and decided to do the movie. It
was then that the studios started offering the millions to Gibson and Lungo. After
much trepidation, the project finally found its funding! So after so many years
of trying to get this movie made, was it finally worth it?

Well, first things first, there’s no denying that this film
turned out to be a quite influential piece of cinema. The directors behind The
Matrix Trilogy; the Wachowski Bros. obviously saw this film and decided they
could do something similar, but better. It’s just so obvious, damn, right down
to the fact that they also used Keanu Reeves for The Matrix. At one point
Johnny says his name is “Mr. Smith”, he plugs himself into a virtual world and
travels through it. Keanu dresses with a white shirt, black suit and tie.
Johnny is kind of like a Christ figure, same as Neo. And basically, the whole
film has a theme about “waking people up”, so yeah, there’s no doubt this one,
along with Mamoru Oshii’sGhost in the Shell (1995) served as a major influence
for The Matrix. Other films that Johnny Mnemonic is similar to? Well, there’s Cyborg(1989) and Babylon A.D. (2008), two films that are also about a courier
transporting the cure for a decease that’s threatening the world, and most recentlyElysium (2013) played with the same ideas.

Johnny Mnemonic is a film that science fiction fans will no
doubt enjoy because it presents us with this dark, technological world in chaos,
kind of like what we saw in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), but with the
added element of seeing technology as mankind’s villain, as a detriment to society,
a hindrance that disconnects us from our humanity. Which isn’t so farfetched
when we consider how connected we all are to our smart phones, I-Pads, I-Pods
and laptops; so in many ways it’s a reflection
of our society and how addicted we are to technology, could we live without it nowadays?
How lost would we be on this planet without our technological advances? Has
humanity separated itself so much from the natural world, that we now don’t
even know how to survive in it? I mean we actually live in a time when going
out to dinner means telling everybody on the table to turn their phones off so
we won’t be distracted by a call, a text message or candy crush. Aside from the
films themes, I also enjoy a lot of the visuals that a movie like this one has
to offer. I mean, how cool does Johnny Mnemonic look hooked up to that Virtual
Reality helmet? Very cool that’s how cool. Like Hackers (1995), The Matrix (1999),
this is a movie that hackers no doubt love, because the hacker is the hero.
Some of the best moments in the film are those of Johnny, hooking up to the
information super highway and just hacking the hell out of it.

But then the movie is hampered by often time’s cheesy dialog
and nonsensical shenanigans. Sometimes the film kind of contradicts itself, for
example, there’s this dolphin in the movie that is supposed to be the savior of
humanity because it’s the dolphin who handles all the data through its brain,
but then the rebels, those who would fight for humanity and freedom, have this
dolphin confined to this little tank that gives it no space to swim at all. To
me, the dolphin looks like its being tortured, trapped in this cage filled with
dirty water, then they also have the dolphin strapped to a helmet that forbids
it from seeing. So we have a blind dolphin who can’t swim because the good guys
need to use him? Peta would have a field day with these guys! Which brings me
to another point about the film, at times it feels like the good guys aren’t
really all that good, take Johnny for example, sure he’s carrying the cure on
his noggin, but does he really have to stop and rant about wanting “room
service and 10,000 dollars a night whores”? I guess the point is that Johnny has
to learn that it’s not just about him anymore, that he has to learn to do
things for others, but damn does he come off as self centered. Then we got the
leader of the rebels played by Ice-T, and well, his performance isn’t much of a
stretch considering how he played basically the same character in Tank Girl (1995).
The most over the top performance has to be Dolph Lundgren as the crazy
preacher. He is really crazy, managing to fuse Jesus with the psychotic. He
carries a crucifix around that could double as Rambo’s knife! He also spews
hilarious one liners like “It’s Jesus Time!” A funny performance and certainly
not what you’d expect from Dolph Lundgren.

And now a word about the computer graphics on this show. There’s
this moment in which Johnny enters cyberspace and we see him controlling his
journey from the real world (sounds like The Matrix don’t it?), well, the
graphics in those scenes are interesting, but unfortunately by today’s
standards look outdated, they do their job of telling a story, but feel truly ancient,
kind of like the computer generated imagery in Lawnmower Man (1992). They might
have been “dazzling!” in their day, but now these graphics seem like child play,
still, this didn’t stop my enjoyment of the film. One has to expect fx to
outdate, I mean, time passes after all. Final words on Johnny Mnemonic is that
it’s a cool little movie, not a masterpiece but at least it has its cool
visuals and that delicious cyberpunk feel that I wish Hollywood would exploit
just a bit more. In my opinion, there aren’t enough cyberpunk films out there. I
can’t comment on how faithful the film is to the short story, but at least we
know the film was written by William Gibson himself; if it fails it’s by Johnny
Mnemonics creator’s own fault! Then again, this was one of those films that the
studio took from the filmmakers and re-edited to their liking, so this might
have something to do with certain inconsistencies. But whatever, faithful to
the story or not, I think Johnny Mnemonic has a couple of cool things going for
it that makes it worth a re-watch. Also, if you ask me, the film remains a
seminal work of cyberpunk cinema, that’s gotta count for something.

6 comments:

Man, I haven't seen this once since it first came out, and I remember hating it. Not because I didn't like the story or Keanu in the lead, but because I thought Longo sucked as a director. I felt it could have been a decent flick had it had an experienced director. But I think it was too big of a project for a first-timer. I understand he was an artist and had only done a few shorts before this. Feature films is not his calling.

Great review by the way. I think I'll revisit this one some day. If I can get past the dated effects, maybe Longo's direction won't seem so horrible this time around.

I agree robotGEEK, a more experienced director would have been better, this could explain why he hasn't directed anything else since Johnny Mnemonic. I'm actually surprised though, because for a film directed by an artist, the film's look perse isn't all that. It does have some key images that I absolutely LOVE, but in terms of the look of the film, it certainly is lacking. I'd expect more from an artist.

My initial reaction to the film was that it wasn't all that it could have been, I mean when I saw this I'd seen SPEED which was a huge production and an adrenaline rush of a film, by comparison, Mnemonic was a dark, sort of post apocalyptic feel to it. It was a dissapointment in that sense. But seeing it now, without any sort of expectations, I have to say it wasn't a bad watch at all, I mean sure, there's some bad acting (Ice-T sucks ass!) and a couple of silly ideas, but overall, I'd have to say it was a fun watch. I enjoyed seeing how much the Wachowskis stole from this one, which was a lot in my opinion.

I also liked seeing how some of the technology that was considered futuristic at the time, now seems out dated as hell. But then again, some of the concepts are spot on, for example, how Johnny swipes things off the screen is what is common place in today's technology.

How can you not love this film?! One of the best Sci Fi films of all time. Keep in mind there was nothing close to the internet in 1981 when Gibson wrote the short story. He coined the term "cyperspace". Who could have imagined at that time that "online" was the primary venue for crime. "I've got to get online", "I need room service!", What other film saw females as the premier body guards? Or Udo Kier greeting his body guard, Grace Jones, with a snake-like tongue kiss. Or Johnny saying: "I've got to get online!" to survive. Or the concept of low level EM radiation being a major source of disease. Or a wet-wired implant to the brain. This film was a rich and accurate glimpse into the future of reality and film making.

I was under the impression that my review had been a positive one, that being said, Johnny Mnemonic is not a "great film", it has its moments but also many faults. I agree with you, the film set many standards, as did Gibson's book.